GPHY 101 Chapter 6: Chapter 6 Interpreting Places and Landscapes.docx

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Geography
• Course: GPHY 101
• Professor: Joyce Davidson

Document Summary

Can mean different things to different people. Collection of evidence about out character and experience, our struggles and triumphs as humans. Ordinary landscape (aka vernacular landscape) everyday landscapes that people create in the course of their lives together; lived in (eg. parking lots, trailer parks, tree-shaded suburbs) Symbolic landscape represent the particular values or aspirations that builders and financiers of those public landscapes want to impart to a larger public (eg. parliament hill in ottawa is intentionally designed to invoke british tradition) Landscapes of despair homeless encampments derelict landscapes landscapes that have experienced abandonment. In geography, places the individual (values, meanings, intentions) at the centre of analysis. Results only apply to individual so it"s hard to generalize into the bigger population. Landscape can be read and written by groups and individuals. Landscapes don"t just exist out of nowhere, but there are writers who produce landscapes and give them meaning and there are readers who consume the messages embedded in landscapes.